James Rising

Sometimes I think I am developing “Clint Eastwood” disease. More on that in a moment.

It’s not that I mind kids. In fact I adore my grandchild. But he’s mine and in any case when he gets cranky and needs a retread I hand him to my son. Some kind of poetic justice there. But other peoples kids in public. Now that’s a different kettle of tantrums. Because that’s what they have. These little rug rats are having loud disagreements in grocery stores, parking lots and even restaurants with their keepers. And it’s spilling over onto me.

I just want to do my thing and go home to the relative peace and quiet at the Rising ranch (quiet except for the goofy neighbor and his band of idiots but that is for another time) but these little ankle-biters will have none of it. They scream they want this, or don’t want to do that. They tumble to the floor and kick and howl like they were being eviscerated, which doesn’t seem like too bad an idea.

Now I understand the underlying psychology here. I remember enough of my Sigmund Freud to know that the insufferable brats are merely asserting their independence from their parents. Well here’s a news flash for you. Siggy was on COCAINE when he figured this stuff out. So how much stock can we put in what a 18th century blow snorting, cigar puffing named Schlomo (His middle name. Look it up.) had to say? Was Sigmund ever trying to buy a shirt at K-Mart with a small child screaming at the sound level of an AC/DC concert? I think not. Did Freud have to contend with a three year old throwing food at a restaurant like he was Tug Mcgraw?

And where are the parents? They seem blissfully unaware, except that occasionally they will swat little Janey or Johnny and pump up the volume even more. Obviously they are so used to it that they probably don’t even hear it. Or they are just plain dumb. Choose one.

“Clint Eastwood” syndrome? No not “Make my day.” I refer to Clint’s excellent flick “Grand Torino” where he tells the world but mostly kids to “GET OFF MY LAWN!” in his trademark menacing growl.

I feel the same way about my personal space. As far as I am concerned we all have a bubble area around us that is ours. Don’t come into mine and I won’t get in yours. But these future generational misfits don’t know this and their useless parents don’t seem to be teaching it.

What we need is an island for all kids between 2 and, oh I don’t know…22?

This is the Sprint Airave ACCESS POINT that they sent me FREE because I bitched up a storm about dropped calls, missed calls.

Company says:

Sprint AIRAVEâ„¢ is a device that creates a CDMA signal for your mobile phone (like a miniature cell tower). AIRAVE provides enhanced and reliable mobile phone coverage in your house or office even if your existing wireless coverage is poor.

Install was pretty much out of the box. It needs to use an external antenna (included) to hit the GPS satellite. When you think about it that is pretty hard to believe. Navsats are 12,000 miles in the sky and we need a piece of wire to hit them? I hooked the deal up-it was pretty stern about connect order. Shut off the router/broadband modem and:

Gizmo does work. Where before the Blackberry Curve was useless in the house I can now make calls pretty reliably. I get about four bars on average. Data D/L is faster and doesn’t seem to hang. But…(and you knew there was one, right?) the damn thing still does NOT ring on every incoming call. Boy does that piss me off.

and….(and this is hilarious)

On my first incoming from my oldest son:

Me: “So I got this signal extender deal from Sprint.”

Him: “And how is it…..”(dead air. Disconnected.)

Technology. Gotta love it.

Rant D’Jour

They say “timing is everything” and if they (whoever they are) mean bad timing…more

They say “timing is everything” and if they (whoever they are) mean bad timing I go to the head of the class. I have been cursed for my entire life with being just a minute too late, arriving right after the good part or worse yet, being right on time for the bad part. Mostly the latter. Let me give you some examples.

I am driving along, making good time, digging on the radio and loving life. I hit a stop light. I am the first person at the light. Now comes the bad timing part. Turning onto the highway in front of me just as the light changes is a WIDE LOAD. It looks like a bulldozer with a gland problem on a flatbed truck the size of the Market Street Bridge. It is moving fast, for a glacier. There is no chance of passing. I am stuck behind this behemoth for the foreseeable future. But wait. It’s turning! It runs a red light but makes a turn off the highway.

I am free, free at last. But no. To my richest horror an even larger WIDE LOAD turns onto the highway and I am once more traveling at a snails pace. If I didn’t think I would be found terminally paranoid (you know, you aren’t paranoid if people are REALLY out to get you) I would say that the operators of this heavy equipment slow motion parade are in cahoots with each other. That they communicate with each other to make sure they are in MY way. Nah. Couldn’t be.
Right?

But back to my bad timing. How about the time I asked for a raise and my boss just looked at me and said, “I’ll have an answer for you tomorrow.” Of course that would be the day I got fired. Or the many times I choose the shortest line at the bank only to have the person in front of me do a transaction that would confuse Einstein. Slowly. Or when I am grocery shopping and the item I want is behind a sumo wrestler sized person who apparently is really into reading labels. Slowly. If there are two waitresses in a crowded restaurant one will be Mother Teresa. I will get the other one. The one who is manic depressive, off her meds and hates men.

Fortune cookies? You pick one and I will get the one that says: “You will inherit a large sum of money at the moment of your death” or worse. Late for work? That’s when the battery goes dead.

If it wasn’t for bad timing, I wouldn’t have any timing at all

Things were going well at WCFR. The new owners wanted to soften the stations’ sound somewhat and since this was my first job as a P.D. I didn’t put up a lot of fuss. The change was incremental and slight. Basically we did a lot of what we in business call “dayparting” songs, which meant that some songs did or did not get played in certain “dayparts.” We might not play “Dream on” by Aerosmith during the morning hours, for example, deeming this too raucous a sound for morning commuters.

We also got a bona-fide jingle package, the first one I had the chance to order. Jingles are of course those singing ID’s that go between songs or out of commercials into songs. I got to audition hundreds of “packages” but of course the eventual choice had to be made from a company called “Tanner”, formerly “Pepper-Tanner.”

The Tanner media production company would produce jingles for you in exchange for commercials on the station. This is known in the business as “Trade” As a matter of fact they would trade anything, including cash. The catch was that they wanted 2 dollars’ worth of commercials for every dollar you got from them, known as 2 for 1. They then resold the time to national advertisers. It meant we played a lot of those spots for the jingles.

I couldn’t have cared less. I had real, cool sounding jingles, in a variety of tempos and lyrics.
Jingle production works like this. You listen to the demo, in this case the station used was WCOD in Hyannis (Cape Cod) Massachusetts:

Simple and free

You picked out the cuts you wanted. Clearly some of the cuts were too raucous for our new, easier sound so I think we ended up with about 15 total. Then you had to rewrite the lyrics. It was my first attempt at this and they came out pretty good. We also changed to “Friendly and Free” and incorporated the we are your friends concept into the station speak. I no longer have any way to ley you hear the WCFR jingles but you can get the idea from the WCOD demo.

Tanner had the master tracks down in Memphis and brought in the same group to re-sing the cuts using WCFR instead of WCOD. Later in my career I would fly into the jingle sessions or listen to them as they were done over a phone patch. I found you got a lot better quality and sometimes a little extra here or there when you were in the studio when the job was done.

I was loving radio now, but it was not conducive to a lot of physical activity. The heaviest thing I had to lift was a box of records (remember those? Black shiny things you played on a turntable?) and I became larger as the years went on. You don’t burn a lot of calories sitting down and yakking into a microphone.

But I was largely unconcerned. I was more worried about my budding broadcast career and my wife and new son. To be honest I was more interested in work than anything else. I loved being on the air almost more than I loved to eat.
I have no idea how much I weighed when a secretary at WCFR called it to my attention. She was a good hearted soul who spoke to me about it in a very nice way. Her concern was about the fact that I had a family to take care of and I was putting them in jeopardy by not addressing my overly ample waistline.

She had a doctor who could help.

At this point if this was an audio presentation you would hear ominous strings to foretell trouble.

This was the first time I had been to a doctor for anything other than childhood diseases or the summer I had Mononucleosis. Which by the way is a great disease to lose weight with. I had “mono” the summer of Woodstock and missed the three days of peace and love because of it. When I went back to school I could feel my ribs! But then a McDonald’s opened up near the school and I lost touch with my ribs very fast.

This Doctor, who I thought at the time was a communist, examined me, weighed me and told me I was “Morbidly Obese”. I just looked at the man. He said “Do you know what that means?” I shook my head no. “You have
Clinically Severe Obesity.” He said.

”You are more than 100 pounds overweight.”

Cue the Violins.

This was, as you can imagine, quite a shock to me. I knew I was heavy but now it had a name? Morbidly? Obese?
The doctor went on to explain in great detail what was going to happen to me if I continued to be morbidly obese. This was a laundry list of ills that I was unprepared for. Hypertension. Diabetes. Arthritis. Heart problems.
I was hardly listening. I was stuck on “morbidly”.

I was 20 years old. How could I be “morbidly” anything at 20?

Why did I think the Doctor was a communist? Because he proceeded to tell me how I was going to live my life. If that’s not communism, what is? No more fast food. No more this. No more that. And if I was to live I would eat mostly stuff like vegetables, and fruits and maybe a little bit of chicken or a small amount of meat. No Ice cream. No potato chips. No pickle and cheese sandwiches. No Oreos.

It was my first “diet”. And like so many to follow it didn’t work.

For you see the Communist doctor was right. Eventually I developed many of the ills he told me I would.
Lord knows I tried to lose weight. But it was much later in my career that I discovered a weight loss secret. I will share it with you at some point.

Life went on and I became more skilled at my craft, both on the air and behind a desk. I took some management classes at a local college at night, which was a struggle as I was doing the morning shift and found it hard to stay awake in the lecture hall. But I did learn and it was worth the effort.

Rant D’Jour

I have become somewhat “germ-a-phobic…more

I have become somewhat germ-phobic. Part of this of course is the relentless media messaging about the swine flu. I am by no means obsessive compulsive about this (I knew someone who was-his hands were the color of a cooked lobster’s shell and the texture of roofing shingles.) but I have become acutely aware of the dancing microbes among us. Most places I go I don’t touch anybody or anything except what I absolutely have to.

If I use the mens room I use a paper towel on everything from the handles on the sink to the doorknob. I will even use my elbows to open doors if I can. This is because of an old joke. Did you hear about the constipated mathematician? He worked it out with a pencil. My version is-did you hear about the constipated finger painter? I need go no further.

I don’t partake of buffets because I am not too sure about the personal hygiene of those in close proximity with my chow. But modern science has found a solution-or have they? By now just about everywhere I go there is a squirt bottle of hand sanitizer. Hand sanitizers-how did we ever get along without the ubiquitous little bottles everywhere? A quick pump and a splash in my hand and I am safe, right?

But I have a sneaking suspicion that they actually make the spread of infectious disease worse. Let’s think about this for a minute. How many others have touched that same little spigot, some with far worse than just DIRTY fingers? And to make things worse research shows that hand sanitizers do not significantly reduce the number of bacteria on the hand and in some cases may potentially increase it.

Even the Food and Drug Administration recommends that hand sanitizers not be used in place of good old fashioned soap and water. By the way, the ingredients in hand sanitizer include water, isopropyl alcohol, glycerin, carbomer, fragrance, aminomethyl propinol, propylene glycol, isopropylmyristate, and tocotheryl acetate. Holy smokes!

But of course I have a simple, cheap and effective solution. Literally. Hydrogen peroxide. Chemical formula H2O2. Right. One little molecule different than water. Comes in a brown bottle and costs half as much as hand sanitizer. This stuff has been used since the 1800’s for everything from mouthwash to disinfecting cuts and wounds. It can be used to treat acne and bleach hair (peroxide blonde). Its only ingredients are hydrogen and oxygen. Get a small, cheap spray bottle and fill it up with the stuff and just spritz yourself when you feel less than fresh and it will actually do some good.

And it makes a dandy rocket fuel.

“Goodnight Irene, goodnight Irene
I’ll see you in my dreams”

Recorded by Huddie ‘Lead Belly’ Ledbetter in 1932

We lost: 9 BIG trees. Some decades old. Where will the mooching deer get pears and apples now? Siding, shingles and ceilings from the leaks. Power and cable and internet for two days. A refrigerator full of food, ice cream now puddles.

We didn’t lose: Cars. Buildings. Our lives. Gratitude.

I personally lost 9 hours of my life at McDonalds, glomming on to the free WiFi and slurping refills on my beverages while trying to do my online work. Trying being the operative word.

The distractions? First and foremost the fact that the Shavertown McDonalds was just about by itself as food provider in the area. The parking lot was jammed. Drive-up lane overflowing. Was it noisy? You bet. Compounded by the fact that nearly every table was taken by Moms, stuffing their brats uneaten Happy Meals in their faces while the progeny bounced and ricocheted about, at times even leaping from tabletop to tabletop. The Happy Meal toy right now is something called “Ben 10 Ultimate Alien.” They are hard hard plastic that makes a sound like billiard balls when they collide with, well anything. Tables, walls, each other. Me. And they did all of that. Often.

Next to me a fellow “Techno-surf” set up. Nice enough guy but every 90 seconds he coughed for 30 seconds like he was bringing up a lung. He did this for the three hours he was there.

No stereotyping meant here, but nine hours facing the entrance allows me to make the following observation. Not very many McDonald’s customers are in danger of a low body mass index. Some are so large they blot out the sun. Objects not fastened down are attracted to them.

One such planet-sized guy perched next to me. Stink? Have you seen the movie “The Fog”? The stench following this guy was palpable, a smell like road-kill dead deer two weeks gone in August.

A word about McDonalds. Everything is meant to get you in and out fast. Even the seats are purposely designed to be uncomfortable to urge you on your way. After nine hours even my well-padded posterior was aching. What this also meant was swift turnover of new, toy flinging brats and Moms to ignore them.

Goodnight Irene. Don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out.

Rant D’Jour

He had been barking all night. I have trouble sleeping sometimes and this was one of those nights. It was…More

He had been barking all night. I have trouble sleeping sometimes and this was one of those nights. It was the day after the big ice storm. Everything had been covered in a film of black ice. Walking anywhere on the Rising Ranch was next to impossible. A trip from the house to the garage was life threatening. A gymnast would have been envious of my moves as I got my feet above my head twice. Haven’t done that since kindergarten. But this was the next day.

I rise early. It could be the name. It could be that I have to be at the gym for 5am. I am the first guy there. I like to arrive a little early. I get up at 4am most days but day after ice storm days I get up at around 3:30. I wasn’t asleep anyway. The dog had kept me up. The ice was mostly gone but now it was raining. Hard. And it was cold. The dog seemed to be barking more frantically now. Dogs can communicate a lot with a bark. This one was saying very plainly, “Help!” It sounded close. Real close.

I grabbed a five cell flashlight. Cops call them emergency nightsticks. Walking was a nightmare. It’s uneven ground and was soaking wet and slippery. Mud tried to suck my boots off. I could see the dog on the other side of our fence thru the privacy slats. Technically it was on the annoying neighbor’s property but it wasn’t his dog. Its eyes shone dull red in the flashlights beam. I had to walk to the end of the fence and back up again. Did I mention the cold hard rain? I got a look at the animal thru the rain from about five feet away. It was a big white dog, could have been an Airedale or a large standard poodle. It was stuck somehow. I got a little closer and it snapped and growled at me. This was above my pay grade.

Back at the house on with 911 they promised to “send” someone.

By the time I had to go no show. After an hour I checked in with the Long Suffering Wife and still no joy. This time the 911 call connected me to the State Police who took the info. And someone came for the dog.

He probably wouldn’t have made it much longer. It was just below freezing and he was in some distress.

Later on I got calls from the ASPCA and the Dog warden. Did I report a lost dog? This was hours later. Glad it wasn’t my dog. Or me.

The thing is when I saw this picture I thought, ‘what’s the big deal?”
I have seen dozens of kitchens just like this one, literally around the corner from the Rising ranch.

Either NEPA is stuck in time or else it’s so retro here that it’s modern again.

You choose.

Restoring the retro house

That's a wrap

Monday 8/22/11

Rant D’Jour Doctors on the take? You betcha!

Blog Post The return of Badgie…

Tuesday 8/23/11
Rant D’Jour Calling George Orwell.

Blog Post Tuesday Review: Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base by Annie Jacobson

Wednesday 8/24/11

Rant D’Jour Top 10 reasons why I left radio…

Blog Post SPEED.com article on Cole Whitt

Thursday 8/25/11

Rant D’Jour The parking lot blues in “A”

Blog Post Radio DaZe: Charlestown and management

Friday 8/26/11

Rant D’Jour Did you ever get a song stuck in your head for days at a time?

Blog Post Hot peppers!

Saturday 8/27/11

Rant D’Jour Is about lawyers.

Blog Post Aggregate Saturday.

Aggregate Sunday:

GOOGLE analytics suck. Mmm k?
–
Earthquake story. That’s what I will write this week for the WEEKENDER. OK that’s set.
–
I have been in a pissy semi-pissed off mood for about a week. I think it was the earthquake. There’s my lead. But it’s true. It could also be Hurricane Irene, expected to blow into town today/tonight/tomorrow.
–
Hurricane preparations. I vacuumed the pool and drew the water level down as far as I could and still run the filter.
Really what else can you do? Out roof already leaks. The roofer looked at it and when he left to “do an estimate for ya” he had little dollar signs dancing in his eyes.
–
We have plenty of bottled water. Enough canned goods to last months. If we need to cook we have the gas grill and two spare tanks. Some of the flashlights work. I have one that hand cranks. I have a battery powered radio and it worked…a while ago. Both main cars are full of gas.
–
It will be a mostly rain event for us. Probably a lot of wind too. I have been in one before, on the seacoast of NH. It was pretty awesome. Stood holding my jacket over my head like a sail and leaned into the wind. Did some “on the coast” reports from a payphone (1984 this was) and heard them later on. Just wind noise with me shouting faintly.
–
Did I mention suck? Well they do.
–
Big day today, busy day before the storm. Yard sales. Errands. Kielbasa fest in Plymouth. Did you know some spell it kielbasi? Heathens. When I was a radio refugee I was a judge for the fest. Several times. Oddly enough my reach with my scribbling on the web now is many, many times greater. Millions. But of course I can’t write about ground meat in intestines on my current outlets. Unless they decide to use kielbasa powered cars. That would be interesting.
–
It’s really humid and miserable. I can feel Irene sneaking into town. I am secure in the knowledge that we have enough bread and milk.
_
Enough. When I begin weather talk I know it’s enough. Thanks for reading. Both of you. All hail GOOGLE!